GOP fails its job interviews

We often think of elections as job interviews for the candidates involved. They tell us what their plans are to uplift our community, state and country, and if we agree with them and believe them competent, we give them the job by supporting them with our votes.

On Friday, for example, Elizabeth Warren, who is running against Republican Sen. Scott Brown, made her pitch to a number of local residents and supporters at the YWCA of Central Massachusetts.

Ms. Warren was joined by Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, the longest-serving woman in Congress, and both noted the contest between Ms. Warren and Mr. Brown was putting nothing less than the future of the country on the line.

If Mr. Brown is re-elected, they noted, he could give Republicans the majority votes in the Senate to dismantle President Barack Obama’s agenda, including repealing the health care law and regulations that were implemented to prevent another Wall Street meltdown.

Ms. Warren said the Republican agenda would continue providing tax cuts to the super rich, while raising taxes on the middle class, a philosophy which she characterized as “I got mine, the rest are on their own.”

“We are better than that,” she said. “We are better people than that.”

President Obama, meanwhile, has been asking for patience with his policies, which have taken the country out of an economic nosedive, and set it on a slow but steady path to recovery.

And while it was always going to be difficult — given the persistent high unemployment rates and decade-long erosion of the middle class — for the president to sell patience as the foundation of a second-term platform, it is still an honorable argument to make.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has all but abandoned any attempt to offer a clear and coherent vision for the future, and he is getting away with it because he and the Republican Party believe they have other options, such as suppressing the votes of the opposition.

Much has been written, for example, about the numerous Republican-supported voter identification laws across the country and efforts to reduce voting hours, both of which had the potential to significantly reduce votes for the president.

In an election as close as this one, those efforts cannot be easily dismissed.

Yet, one of the most onerous of the voter intimidating tactics has been the growing number of CEOs who are suggesting that their employees’ jobs might be on the line if those employees do not vote the Republican ticket.

Among the CEOs who have gone down this path are Arthur Allen, CEO of ASG Software Solutions; David Siegel of Florida’s Westgate Resorts; and David and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries.

Mr. Siegel, for example, sent the following email to 7,000 employees:

“It is quite simple, if any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current President plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company. Rather than grow this company I will be forced to cut back. This means fewer jobs, less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.”

It’s frightening to think we are regressing to the company town economic model of the past, when residents and workers were expected to be loyal to the companies that control their lives.

“I am out here every single day working for every single vote,” Ms. Warren told me Friday. “Our votes are precious, they are important and meaningful to us, and each of us has the right to exercise them.”

Indeed. A long-time consumer advocate, Ms. Warren’s next big battle might just have her fighting to protect workers from corporations who want to steal their vote.